Many experimental proposals for noisy intermediate scale quantum devices involve training a parameterized quantum circuit with a classical optimization loop. Such hybrid quantum-classical algorithms are popular for applications in quantum simulation, optimization, and machine learning. Due to its simplicity and hardware efficiency, random circuits are often proposed as initial guesses for exploring the space of quantum states. We show that the exponential dimension of Hilbert space and the gradient estimation complexity make this choice unsuitable for hybrid quantum-classical algorithms run on more than a few qubits. Specifically, we show tha...

Purpose
Use adjudication to quantify errors in diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading based on individual graders and majority decision, and to train an improved automated algorithm for DR grading.
Design
Retrospective analysis.
Participants
Retinal fundus images from DR screening programs.
Methods
Images were each graded by the algorithm, U.S. board-certified ophthalmologists, and retinal specialists. The adjudicated consensus of the retinal specialists served as the reference standard.
Main Outcome Measures
For agreement between different graders as well as between the graders and the algorithm, we measured the (quadratic-weight...

Rewards are sparse in the real world and most today’s reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with such sparsity. One solution to this problem is to allow the
agent to create rewards for itself — thus making rewards dense and more suitable
for learning. In particular, inspired by curious behaviour in animals, observing
something novel could be rewarded with a bonus. Such bonus is summed up with
the real task reward — making it possible for RL algorithms to learn from the
combined reward. We propose a new curiosity method which uses episodic memory to form the novelty bonus. To determine the bonus, the current observation
is compared ...

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope was designed to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars, but these planets are on the very edge of the mission's detection sensitivity. Accurately determining the occurrence rate of these planets will require automatically and accurately assessing the likelihood that individual candidates are indeed planets, even at low signal-to-noise ratios. We present a method for classifying potential planet signals using deep learning, a class of machine learning algorithms that have recently become state-of-the-art in a wide variety of tasks. We train a deep convolutional neural network to pre...